“Mr Alexandre, one of the brightest minds in Catalonia, nails it again.

A political problem is resolved via political decision making and policy implementation.
Civic demonstrations and rallies are noise. A cry for attention given everything else seems to have failed.

After all, this Estatut that has been decimated by the Spanish CC is an already cut-down version of the Estatut approved by the Catalan Parliament in 2005 by all parties except the Spanish PP. In a matter of days, that Estatut was watered down by CiU and PSC-PSOE in closed-door negotiations.

Therein lies one of the conundrums of Catalan politics: support for independence, overt or subtle is ever higher, growing almost by the month. Today’s rally was a rally in favour of independence. However, none of the mainstream parties, not even ERC, let alone CiU, do try to implement the policies they carry in their manifestos. ”

Hi John, thanks for the link . If you think this has been eventful just wait until next week, on wednesday (I believe) the Catalan Parliament will vote whether to ban bullfighting or not and the PSOE have given freedom of voting which means that the ban will likely be approved. And well just wait until the elections results, things are going to get quite interesting indeed.

Hi John, thanks for the link, really flattered to be next to Víctor Alexandre!

Get this: the EU might ban the Catalan correfocs (fireruns?) on health & safety grounds.
The French are ok with the ban since this demonstration of popular culture is becoming mainstream in the the Rosselló (Perpignan counties) as a show of Catalan cultural identity -even if it has little political meaning they don’t like it.

The Catalan regional parliamentarians are massively pissed off with the Estatut so the PSC is giving their representatives a free vote and it is not unthinkable now that the Catalan parliament will vote in favour of banning bullfighting (whether it can be implemented is another matter…)

Some Spanish media columnists are saying that if the Catalans ban bullfighting, the Spanish MEPs should not veto the banning of correfocs in the EU Parliament and side with the French, and on top of that Spain should add a ban on castellers (human towers) using children straight away.